DSI Annual Meeting 2018 - Decision Sciences Institute

Attendees

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Exhibitors

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Overview

Event Overview:

Through national, international and regional conferences, competitions, and publications, the Institute provides an international forum for presenting and sharing research in the study of decision processes across disciplines. The Institute also plays a vital role in the academic community by offering professional development activities and job placement services.

The DSI Annual Meeting invites basic, applied, and case study research in the field of decision sciences, as well as proposals for panel discussion, symposia, workshops, and tutorials dealing with research or pedagogical issues. The conference will include invited sessions featuring highly respected researchers, educators, and practitioners to share their knowledge and experience on decision-making practices.

About DSI:

The Decision Sciences Institute (DSI) is a professional organization of academicians and practitioners interested in the application of quantitative and behavioral methods to the problems of society.

Through national, international, and regional conferences; competitions; and publications, the Institute provides an international forum for presenting and sharing research in the study of decision processes across disciplines. The Institute also plays a vital role in the academic community by offering professional development activities and job placement services.

Keynote Speakers

Prof. David Simchi-Levi

Professor of Engineering Systems at MIT Chairman of Opalytics

Online Resource Allocation with Application to Revenue Management

Online resource allocation is a fundamental problem in OR and CS with applications such as offering products to customers, distributing jobs to candidates, assigning advertisers to ad slots, and matching drivers to passengers. These problems can be abstracted as follows: there are fixed resources, each of which can be sold at multiple known prices. These resources must be allocated on-the-fly, without assuming anything about future demand. In this talk we cover the CS and OR literature on the problem and in particular focus on two techniques: exploration and exploitation methods, as well as competitive analysis.

In the latter case, we review new algorithms that achieve tight competitive ratios under the integral or asymptotic settings. Our algorithms are simple, intuitive and robust and our competitive ratios are provably optimal, for every possible set of prices.

In the former case, we discuss an efficient and effective dynamic pricing algorithm, which builds upon the Thompson sampling algorithm used for multi-armed bandit problems by incorporating inventory constraints into the pricing decisions. The algorithm proves to have both strong theoretical performance guarantees as well as promising numerical performance results when compared to other algorithms developed for the same setting.

Finally, we compare the performance of both techniques, exploration and exploitation methods and competitive analysis, with real-world and synthetic data from various retail applications.

Prof. David Simchi-Levi is considered one of the premier thought leaders in supply chain management and business analytics. His research focuses on developing and implementing robust and efficient techniques for operations management. He has published widely in professional journals on both practical and theoretical aspects of supply chain and revenue management.

Guy Schweppe

Senior Vice President, Global Operations Dell Inc.

Procurement excellence requires influence and collaboration at all stages of the product lifecycle. In this session, Guy Schweppe, senior vice president, Global Operations at Dell, will talk about the journey Dell has been on to advance its procurement practices over the last decade, outlining Dell’s approach to procurement excellence and a deep dive into the critical elements of its strategy, including:

Guy Schweppe is a senior vice president within Dell’s Global Operations organization with responsibility for Dell’s Production Procurement and Global Materials organizations. He serves on the National Minority Supplier Development Council (NMSDC) Board of Directors and is a member of the Manufacturers Alliance for Productivity and Innovation (MAPI) Purchasing Council and Texas A&M University Supply Chain Consortium.

Since joining Dell in 1997, Guy has held various positions within the Global Operations organization. Before joining Dell, he held a senior management position at Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting) for more than eight years, where he was responsible for the management of state and local government software application development and deployment specializing in retirement and benefits solutions.

Guy received a bachelor’s degree in political science from Texas A&M University.